


Ultramontane

by hakuraimaru



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Ash Lynx Lives, Ash goes to the Caribbean, Attempted Sex (Not With Blanca), Birdwatching, Blanca Almost Uses His Psych Degree, Blood, Gen, Guilt, Hiking, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Loss, Misogyny, Polyamory, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Private Opinion References, Punching Walls Until Our Fists Bleed, Spot The Obligatory Greek Mythology
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-08
Updated: 2020-01-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:34:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22171900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hakuraimaru/pseuds/hakuraimaru
Summary: The wound was fairly obvious underneath Ash’s overcoat. A knife straight to the stomach, stuck in all the way to the handle—how had Ash Lynx been struck by a blow like that?“How long ago did this happen?” he asked, skirting around the wound with his thumb to get a better look at it. Ash mumbled something and winced. “What? Speak up.”He felt Ash’s head suddenly roll, and looked back down at his face. “IsaidI don’t want to die.”Two men find Kilimanjaro in the Caribbean and attempt a climb. [Complete, with potential upcoming epilogue]
Relationships: Ash Lynx/Okumura Eiji (implied), Blanca & Ash Lynx
Comments: 13
Kudos: 44





	Ultramontane

_Manchame Gate - 5,718 feet_

“...you were right, Blanca.”

The banter had dried up. All at once, the fair day fell away into something melancholy.

Ash had turned away. “I’m just bad news for him,” he said. “I shouldn’t be any part of his life. I know that now…”

Inches behind him, Blanca listened. 

It was funny—he never would have believed he’d see Ash again, but the moment the stout, midday shadows flickered behind him, he’d known his protégé’s presence as a fact. It was a reality he hadn’t dared hope for, but wouldn’t dare doubt when it came knocking. And here was the impossible, playing out in a matter of feet and inches at the edge of Central Park, and his own, grim sentence coming back to haunt him.

Ash dropped back onto the park bench with a thud. “Actually, I knew it all along. I guess I just didn’t want to admit it.” He sniffed in a way that sounded like a laugh. “...pretty pathetic, huh?”

Blanca’s heart sank a little. “No, Ash. It’s not.”

Not that he could blame him for thinking so. When Natasha had died (oh, Natasha! She was more phantasmal every time he remembered her) Blanca had looked back over his life with a cold eye. Of course it had been a selfish mistake, he knew, and the only thing to blame for it was his flimsy will and brittle morals. He was wicked for ever touching her, wicked for holding her in his mind, always in that white dress and sunhat; he was wicked for rendering her imperfectly, for touching her with his wicked hands and wicked heart. He’d stewed in quiet, lonely self-disgust for years—but not forever. No, he’d never pardoned himself, but the more miserable American authors he read, the more he found himself in excellent company.

“The first time I met Eiji,” Ash mused, “he knew I was this street gang leader and everything, but he wasn’t scared of me, or watching his step at all...he just came right up and started talking to me in this lousy English I could hardly understand.”

That sounded like Eiji. From the few moments Blanca had witnessed, he was earnest, a little naïve, and mild yet stubborn. He wasn’t quite as self-assured as Natasha, but from where Blanca stood—where Ash stood—they were the happy people. Not all the time, but beneath the surface troubles, anxieties, and dissatisfactions, a deep current of appreciation seemed to underlie their lives. It was something Blanca would never have believed in had he not seen it in another person, as stark and undeniable as sunlight.

“I thought he was kind of freaky. At first, I thought it was because he was Japanese, or because we couldn’t communicate that well. But eventually, I figured out that wasn’t it.” His voice had taken on a contemplative tone. “Whenever he was around me...it was like all his goodness, and trust, and— _warmth_ would come flooding into my body, and I could feel it filling me up. But I—” 

Ash’s voice dropped away. “My body reacts to threats and stuff like a damned machine—and keeps killing people,” he mumbled, “and hurting them. Without thinking. Without feeling a damn thing.”

He sighed a little, which was unlike him.

“I’ve never scared myself or felt so ashamed of myself as right now. I’m never seeing him again.”

The defeat in his voice reminded Blanca of four years earlier. Back then, Ash was always freezing in fear, disbelief, hopelessness; his body would flinch back or kick out, but his demeanor would lock up and the spirit leave his eyes. Now, as something slow and dangerous—his own life!—threatened to catch up to him, Ash had taken to slowly icing over in all the same ways. Such a thorough self-rejection wasn’t easy to survive.

“...but he’s still my friend,” Ash said. “Even if I can’t ever see him again...I’m allowed to think about him at least, aren’t I?”

Blanca didn’t even try to answer that. “...what do you plan to do with yourself?”

Ash hesitated. He shook his head. “Dunno. Go back to being a street punk, I guess.”

“Wouldn’t you like to join me in the Caribbean?”

It wasn’t a premeditated idea, but in a rare moment of clarity about his own life, the words had come to Blanca. He almost couldn’t believe he’d said them, although from the way Ash froze, he was sure he had. Now, suddenly, something unbelievable was on the table.

Then, Ash’s shoulders slumped again. “You want to take me along to assuage your own feelings of loneliness?” he scoffed. “That ain’t like you, Sergei.”

Blanca’s eyes fell to the sparse patches of grass by his feet. Ash was right. He felt almost embarrassed.

Below them, two grubs were wrestling each other with seemingly cannibalistic intent. Their sluggish movements made the whole struggle absurd; their snapping mandibles looked ridiculous on their young, soft bodies. 

“Humor me for a minute, Ash,” he said, tilting his head back. “You _did_ finish _Islands in the Stream,_ didn’t you?”

“That crummy Hemingway book? Sure, ages ago,” he replied.

“Crummy is right,” Blanca chuckled. “You know, Hemingway—”

“—never actually finished it,” Ash finished for him. “It’s a bunch of fragments assembled by his wife.”

Blanca smiled. “The kids really do know everything, huh? Maybe you already know this, too. Critics tend to agree that the last section of the novel is the weakest part.” He could feel Ash staring at him with a familiar, long-missed curiosity. “Some of them claim Hemingway had the most trouble writing it. They say he wrote prose with the mere function of delivering the main character to death.”

“All of his sons were dead,” Ash said. “It was the logical place for the narrative to go.”

“Maybe so—eventually.”

“How would you have it, then?” Ash snapped.

Blanca squinted at a minute shadow against the sun, distant and south-bound. “I’m afraid I’m not qualified to make that call. If he’d had more time, I’d like to think Hemingway would have mulled it over long enough to figure it out himself. You know, Ash, your liver has a substantial advantage over his.”

“Too bad I wasn’t born the author.”

“So you weren’t disappointed?” Blanca looked back to Ash.

The boy stared back at him defiantly. “Shitty books have shitty endings.”

“Or shitty endings make shitty books,” he replied coolly. “Perhaps I should ask a different question. After everything that’s happened to you, with everything that could happen to you after this, you’re telling me you wouldn’t be disappointed to crawl under someone’s porch and die like an animal?”

Leisurely, Ash stood and donned his jacket. “Well, I wish I could say it’s been a pleasure.”

“I’m sure you know where to find me.”

Ash left without another word. He did not extend his hand to shake. Fifty feet away, he did not shout some last obscenity. A hundred feet away, he did not wave.

Blanca chanced a little optimism. His student wasn’t one to leave loose ends hanging.

_Manchame Camp - 9,927 feet_

February turned into March, and suddenly Blanca’s flight was at the end of the week. He hadn’t planned to stay so long, and couldn’t afford to wait any longer—not that he had anywhere to be. But whenever he found himself in the midst of a dogfight, he somehow always got himself roped into it. Heaven knew how many skirmishes were staking him out that night.

He wasn’t particularly enthusiastic to go back. There had come a point in his rather overexciting life where Blanca decided he had seen enough first-hand, that he wanted to lean back against his cushions and have a _subtle_ experience for a change. Perhaps he had gotten what he wanted. He could look at a painting or read a book and be stirred by some foreign sentiment or desire, and what more sensitivity could he ask for than that? But there was the trouble. Decadence, diligence, and the stars above had aligned for him to learn how to feel human feelings again, and yet his life was immaterial, foundationless; smooth, with no hooks for sentiments to attach. Still, it was perhaps the best life he’d had.

By this point, he had begun packing, although the task admittedly wasn’t very daunting. He found himself wishing he had lived in his room a bit more; it was a little depressing and a little embarrassing to find his belongings already so well packed. One visit to the dry cleaners and it would be as though he never came.

While he was gathering the items for said visit, the bedside phone started to ring. He dropped his suits onto the nearest bed and picked up the line.

“S-sir,” the voice at the other end quivered. “Visitor for you in the—what? W-where are you going? Sir, you can’t—”

Blanca hung up and drew his gun. Shoes on or off? On, he decided—better for kicking. Taking advantage of the gratuitous carpeting, he stepped carefully near the door and pressed his ear to the wall beside it. He heard the elevator chime, one set of footsteps, then two, the latter quicker and more agitated than the former. Bickering noises—the concierge from the phone. Panting that was too familiar to doubt. He switched his gun’s safety back on and opened the door.

Ten doors down, hunched over and wheezing, Ash looked up at him and froze. He was paper-pale and even from a distance smelled like blood.

“Ash?” Blanca took an experimental step towards him. He saw a pearly sheen across Ash’s forehead. Had he killed someone?

“Blanca,” Ash said in reply, almost squinting. His head tipped forward a bit, and Blanca suddenly noticed a dark stain growing in the burgundy carpet.

“Oh my god,” he said, bolting. “Where is it? Stomach? Ash!”

He dropped to his knees as Ash began to pitch forward, and caught him gingerly by the shoulders. He met with no resistance. On the contrary, whatever had been holding Ash up seemed to have gone slack.

“How bad is it?” Supporting his weight as much as he could, Blanca flipped him over.

“Blanca,” Ash said again, though his mouth barely moved. He was looking up with strained, half-dazed uncertainty.

The wound was fairly obvious underneath Ash’s overcoat. A knife straight to the stomach, stuck in all the way to the handle—how had Ash Lynx been struck by a blow like that?

“How long ago did this happen?” he asked, skirting around the wound with his thumb to get a better look at it. Ash mumbled something and winced. “What? Speak up.”

He felt Ash’s head suddenly roll, and looked back down at his face. “I _said_ I don’t want to die.” Ash glared at him as though he’d lost a hand of poker and Blanca was coming to collect, along with an admixture of fear from that unspoken question— _what’s going to happen to me now?_

An unexpected, completely inappropriate wave of delight shocked Blanca. “You dear boy. Of course you’re not going to die.” He shifted his arms under Ash and hauled himself to his feet.

Ash hissed. “Son of a bitch, that hurts!”

“I have a doctor two floors above us. He’s quite good. This is above my paygrade, but if we can avoid a hospital…”

He hefted Ash’s jacket over his shoulder and heard something flutter loose. Ash jolted, straining to look at something behind him on the floor. Blanca followed his eyes, craning his neck to look over his shoulder.

“This?” Slowly, he bent down, shifting Ash’s weight to his right. With his free hand, he reached out and retrieved a couple of smudged papers. At a glance, the cursive was even and deliberate, the lines perfectly spaced—it seemed that the writer, too, had cared very much about its contents.

“Please.” Ash’s voice was low with exhaustion and something close to resignation.

“It’s important, isn’t it? Of course I’ll keep it safe,” Blanca assured him. He felt Ash sigh. “Is it Eiji?” 

Ash hummed an affirmation. “Back with Ibe,” he murmured.

“His older friend? They went back to Japan, didn’t they?” Blanca asked, but Ash seemed to lose the will to respond.

 _Eiji does not exist for your salvation,_ he had said, and that was still true. A need didn’t constitute a right, nor were all needs right to satisfy. Blanca had needs with remedies that his demented life could not yet accommodate. Once, he had tasted something good and become rapaciously foolish, and now that good was squandered. But Ash was a better, more stubborn man than he, and had given up what Blanca couldn’t part from so long ago. In that, Blanca had begun to believe, lay the difference between Ash’s future and his own.

“You know, Ash,” he ventured, “it’s not impossible that you’ll see each other again. Maybe not as the same people...still. Fortune might favor you.”

The corner of Ash’s mouth twitched. He’d probably meant to laugh, Blanca knew, but he nevertheless appeared to have a faint smile. It was hard to believe Ash was capable of such an expression.

_Shira Caves - 12,355 feet_

Blanca had greeted the concierge, still seemingly bewildered by him from the other day, and taken the elevator up to the ninth floor. He had a paper bag of bread and farmer’s market tomatoes—now, _there_ was something he would miss. America was a land of countryside sprawl, and highways cutting through phthalo-green columns of poplars...he had seen none of it. The city had its patches of so-called “nature,” but parks and reserves were never more than glimpses of respite through a window, with man on one side and the world on the other. Perhaps that was the reason he found those American authors so difficult to understand.

He occasionally wondered if he might be suited to come back in the future. As of yet, he couldn’t conceive of a life that wasn’t elevated to some insular degree. Whether he was firing exceptional shots or sitting back on exceptional laurels, life as a man among men was not yet possible for him. He felt fundamentally displaced from this country and every country, from this time and every time. So he would take the red-eye that night, cross the Atlantic, and make time stand still for him yet again as he tried to catch up to it.

He was concerned that, despite coming this far already, Ash wouldn’t be well enough to fly with him. He had slept for 48 hours and was still sleeping when Blanca left that morning. That was normal enough for a person in his state...still, Blanca worried that the whole scheme would fall apart if he slipped out the door and expected Ash to follow on his own.

When he reached the unassuming Room 904, he knocked twice to announce his presence before keying in. He opened the door to a dark living room. Strange.

“Honey, I’m home,” he called out. He had two guns in his coat and another at his waist, but he hesitated to draw. He listened for signs of life—nothing, not even the sound of breathing. Either someone had taken Ash, or…he put his hands up and rounded the corner into the bedroom.

As expected, Ash stared him down over a long-barreled pistol. Half his face was hidden behind his arms—good form—but his eyes betrayed his distrust.

“Ash, what’s this about?” Blanca asked lightly.

“Did you do this?” he demanded. “Did you bring me here?”

Blanca sobered a little. “You don’t remember the other night?” he asked, trying to coax the encounter in a less high-strung direction.

Ash tensed further and glared. “What happened ‘the other night’?” he bit back.

Parsing his meaning, Blanca adopted a more serious tone. “You know more than I do. You came to my hotel room with a stab wound, and I took you to see my friend, the physician. It’s been a couple of days. I’m glad you're feeling better,” he added pleasantly.

Ash didn't lower the gun. “I don’t remember being stabbed.”

“You didn’t elaborate on it. Oh, that reminds me.” He reached slowly into his coat, although he wasn't particularly worried—Ash surely knew there already would have been a firefight if Blanca wanted one. “You wanted me to keep this letter. Here.”

From the moment he saw it, Ash’s expression changed. He paused, as if uncertain. Then, in one motion, he flipped the safety on the gun and snatched the papers out of Blanca’s hand.

“Whew,” Blanca chuckled, “it’s a good thing I had that on me!”

Ash didn’t respond. Blanca noticed his hands trembling as he paged through the letter, eyes traveling to the bottom of the last page, thumb dwelling below the last line as though his life were staked on it being there.

He shook his head. “I was supposed to be dead. He gave me this...I was all right with it.” His body sank into a crouch, his head into his hands. “So why am I here?”

“You weren’t all right with it the other night.”

“It was Sing’s brother. He was trying to—I said I’d fight Sing in front of his guys, I had it coming. And I shot him, too, after...goddamn it.” Ash pulled at his hair in weak protest. “I should have died. This all should have ended.”

Blanca towered before his protégé, considering him. Ash had always been fascinating, but over the past week, he felt that he had seen an explosion of Ash’s. There was the Ash who lived by force and pragmatism, the Ash that picked fights with goliaths with hardly a stone in his hand, the Ash that fed himself to the lions for a hostage and pulled the trigger in any direction at a word...the Ash that rolled over on a concrete floor and said, “I’m _happy,_ goddammit”...and now, the Ash who could look up at him and spit, “I don’t want to die.” None of them looked like the same person to Blanca, but the first four he could perhaps reconcile with each other. As for the fifth...

“Perhaps something did die,” he mused. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I get the feeling you caught a glimpse of something—an alternative. And now that you’ve seen it, you can’t go back to that life.”

Ash glowered up at him through his fingers. “You read it, didn’t you?”

“The letter? I did nothing of the sort. I’m not being clever, either. No baseball or Irishmen,” Blanca added with a touch of amusement. “You told me yourself, when you came here on your own two feet—‘I don’t want to die.’ I don’t believe you were capable of feeling that way before. I think you saw something that compelled you to leave your life behind.”

“So I’m some kind of coward after all,” Ash laughed mirthlessly.

“You think it’s cowardly not to live a miserable life?” Blanca asked. “I don’t. I think I’m more the coward for ‘playing the role I was given’—genuinely, Ash. I know a tidy end is ostensibly noble,” he pursed his lips, “but it’s not always meaningful. It wouldn’t be, in your case.”

“As opposed to what?” Ash scoffed. “What would you have me do?”

“I don’t know. Become human. Stay human.”

“How? There’s nothing human about me,” Ash said, dropping his head back onto his arms. “I’ve done too much. I’m too far up the mountain. You’re the Hemingway fan, Blanca. Don’t you remember what happens to the leopard?”

“Yes, _of course_ I know ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro,’ Ash.” Blanca shook his head fondly. “You’re talking about the epigram at the very beginning of the story as though it’s the end. But Harry’s certainly not a leopard. Neither are you.”

Ash sighed. “That’s what Eiji told me, you know. It’s funny. I didn’t think you two were anything alike.” His eyebrows drew together. “But you’re both wrong. A thing like me can’t— _shouldn’t_ be alive.”

“But that’s what I’m saying, Ash,” Blanca gently insisted. “Something died. But you came back.” 

“Ha. God knows why.” Slowly, he shook his head again. Blanca couldn’t tell if it was disbelief or a silent protest.

“What do you plan to do with yourself?” he asked again.

Drawing a breath, Ash resurfaced from his knees, staring straight ahead as he seemed to fumble for some remnant of resolve. “Survive, probably. Seems like that’s all I’m good at doing.”

In three ponderous steps, Blanca came to stand no more than an arm’s length from Ash. The dark room cast no shadows, but he came to feel, standing in nearly the same place as the boy, that he and Ash had come to a standstill in the very same shade. He kneeled in front of him, praying to be understood, and began again.

“Wouldn’t you like to join me in the Caribbean?”

Ash’s eyes flickered up at him. He didn’t speak immediately, and when he did, it was uncannily quiet for him. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know what I’d do if I weren’t here.”

“You’ll never have a better opportunity to figure it out.” Blanca almost reached out to him, but tempered himself. “I’m not going to force you to do anything. I’m just afraid I’ve spent all of these years teaching you useless things. I wish you’d let me teach you something worth knowing. Those are my selfish feelings on the matter.”

“Your ‘selfish feelings,’ huh?” Ash gave him a weirdly amused sort of look, dropping his chin on a haphazardly propped fist. He continued to stare for a moment longer, and Blanca was reminded of their days scheming up hypothetical wars and playing them out like chess in the monsieur’s garden. Already, he noticed how much more difficult it was teaching a subject in which he, himself, was a novice. He probably couldn’t even really call it “teaching” so much as “learning,” the same way an exceptionally smart animal “learned” from its stupider companions.

“What about my guys?” Ash asked.

Blanca hummed. “As far as I can tell, there’s no way out of hurting them,” he conceded. “It doesn’t matter whether that’s now or when you get killed in a year or two. Or maybe sooner—you’re not the same Ash Lynx.”

“No, I’m not,” he agreed, much to Blanca’s surprise. “Golzine’s dead, Foxx is dead, Griffin’s dead, half my friends are dead, and the truth about Banana Fish is finally out there. I don’t know what I’d do with myself here, either,” he laughed, sharply but not insincerely. “But I guess...it wouldn’t have to be forever, if I left now. You said that earlier, didn’t you? That it wouldn’t be impossible for me and Eiji...?”

“I see no reason why it would be impossible,” Blanca said, feeling an uncomfortable weight had been conferred yet again onto his opinion. “I suppose it would depend on what type of person you become.”

“Well, then,” Ash frowned, “I guess this is the best I can hope for.”

Never before had such noncommittal words so bright and auspicious a meaning.

_Barranco Valley - 13,066 feet_

“It’s obscene,” Ash had declared, looking upon the eleven rooms, swimming pool, and outdoor tiki bar with dismay.

“It was the smallest house I could find,” Blanca had protested, but the appalled expression never left Ash’s face as he opened double doors onto wrought iron terraces and discovered full wine racks under granite countertops. He screamed when he mistook a bidet for a sink.

“Why don’t we go out for a bit?” Blanca had suggested mildly.

Thus, he and Ash had taken a taxi to Nassau and elected to take an afternoon hike through the national park. Momentarily, Blanca had considered packing something to eat, but felt rather silly after he realized there was no food in the pantry, and furthermore, aside from his briefcase, he owned no other bags to boot. 

In the cab, Ash eyeballed him. “Won’t you be hot in that?”

He hadn’t bothered unpacking, either, and was wearing exactly what he’d worn onto the plane, overcoat and all.

“That didn’t occur to me,” he admitted. “Temperature doesn’t really bother me, though.”

“Sure. Just let me know when you change your mind,” Ash replied snidely.

“Are you offering to carry my jacket? What a thoughtful guest I have,” Blanca said with glee. Ash made an indescribably ugly face and turned his back to him for the rest of the car ride.

Luckily for Blanca, the trail was generously shaded, albeit practically steaming with humidity. With all the buzz around the beaches, it was easy to overlook the forests the Bahamas had to offer, which Blanca had been meaning to investigate for quite some time. Now that he was finally walking through it, it was hard for him to believe just how thick and green the vegetation was, and just how much wildlife fit into one patch of land.

“How much have you hiked before, Ash?” he asked amiably. His companion seemed to think for a moment before answering.

“If Central Park doesn’t count...maybe once or twice with Griffin?” he guessed, shrugging. “It’s not like I never went outside. Hikes are just sort of...deliberate, y’know?”

“Hmm,” Blanca nodded. “Me neither. I’ve done a couple since coming here, but not before.”

Most of their time was spent in silence—or, rather, not in conversation. The reserve itself was surprisingly loud, lush with the sounds of birds, bugs, and the ocean somewhere further off. The ground on either side of the path gave way to sinkholes, which smelled of wet clay and alien fungi. Blanca didn’t yet know if he cared for such places or not.

They came to rest at the top of a shaded hill, which gently sloped into one of the path’s distinctive ravines, covered in ferns and touched by only the faintest mottles of sunlight. Blanca spread his overcoat over the wet ground and sat on it. He could have laughed at Ash’s astonished expression.

“Care to join me?” he offered, scooting over to one side. Ash seemed to hesitate only momentarily before thudding onto the ground next to him.

“So...what are we doing here?”

“ _I’m_ reading,” Blanca replied wryly, digging under his coat to pull out a cloth-covered text. 

Ash scowled at him. “Good for you. What the hell am _I_ supposed to do?”

“Take a nap?” he suggested, which wasn’t a completely outlandish suggestion after their 5am flight. He had half a mind to do so himself.

“Nah.” Ash leaned back on his palms. “I couldn’t sleep now if I tried.”

Blanca felt a twinge of guilt at that. As much as he enjoyed teasing Ash, they had arrived only hours earlier, and hadn’t negotiated how any of this would work. Given Ash’s track record with changes in scenery, there was no question that he was uncomfortable right now, or even nervous...Blanca could have kicked himself.

“What are you reading, anyway?” Ash asked flippantly, as he always did when Blanca had a book on hand.

“I’m afraid you wouldn’t like this one much, Ash,” he replied airily, “although I can at least say that for once, it’s not Hemingway.”

“Oh, really?” Ash’s voice grew a little more buoyant, and he craned his neck to get a better look. “I’m proud of you, geezer. Who is it, then?”

“A Russian-turned-American author, if you can believe it. He wrote half his books in English and half in Russian.”

“What about this one? English or Russian?”

“English, but it’s all Greek to me.” Blanca gave an exasperated little laugh. “He’s a very difficult and mischievous writer—and he’s written such a horrible main character! So much for understanding the Russians better.”

“Are you reading Nabokov?” Ash asked, sounding just shy of accusative.

Blanca shook his head in defeat. “You’re too sharp for me, Ash.”

“You perv.” Ash was cackling before Blanca could even respond. “Don’t look so indignant, I’m kidding. You’re right, though—I’d probably hate it. Why waste your time reading about what horrible people do in their spare time?”

“Fair enough.” Blanca thumbed through the brittle opening pages, his copy yellowed with age. “I find it pretty interesting, though. It seems like all these ‘horrible people’ can do is act out their obsessions in every area of their lives. It’s a little sad and a little scary. Plenty of people spend their lives trying to find something beautiful, or noble—but some people turn out awful when they go on searching like that.”

Ash yawned. “Yeah, I still don’t think it’s that interesting. Shitty people are everywhere. Just show me a good person and call it a day.”

“What an ‘Ash’ thing to say,” Blanca said, and laughed again. When all was said and done, he was sympathetic. Politics, weaponry, warfare—he, too, had been prescribed quite enough interests for a lifetime. “Well, then, did you bring the binoculars?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah.” Ash pulled a palm-sized, fairly ornate pair out of his pocket. 

“Were you sitting on them?” Blanca asked with dismay. “Damn it, those are mother of pearl!”

Holding them up to a sliver of sunlight, Ash raised his brows. “You sure these aren’t opera glasses?”

“Well, yes. They’re all I had.” Blanca felt a little sheepish about it. The monsieur had made a gift of them in their earlier days, when the opera was a staple of their mutual lifestyle. He was a little surprised Ash didn’t recognize them—but then, he supposed, Ash had been fairly preoccupied with his unfortunate role in that lifestyle.

Experimentally, Ash held them up to his eyes. “They still magnify stuff, I guess. What’d you want me to bring them for?”

“I’ve heard that birdwatching is rather interesting here,” Blanca said, fully anticipating Ash’s expression of outrage and enjoying every bit of it. “I’m serious. There are quite a few species of hummingbirds, grebes—even parrots. I can’t promise you’ll see anything interesting, but this would be the place to look.”

“Hmph.” Ash dropped onto his back, holding up the glasses to his eyes with two fingers the way one might dangle a cigarette. “Yeah, there’s nothing here.”

“Keep at it a bit,” Blanca advised, beginning again with his book.

> Let me retain for a moment that scene in all its trivial and fateful detail: hag Holmes writing out a receipt, scratching her head, pulling a drawer out of her desk, pouring change into my impatient palm, then neatly spreading a banknote over it with a bright “...and five!”; photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall (“nature study”); the framed diploma of the camp’s dietitian; my trembling hands; a card produced by efficient Holmes with a report of Dolly Haze’s behavior for July (“fair to good; keen on swimming and boating”); a sound of trees and birds, and my pounding heart...I was standing with my back to the open door, and then I felt the blood rush to my head as I heard her respiration and voice behind me. She arrived dragging and bumping her heavy suitcase. “Hi!” she said, and stood still, looking at me with sly, glad eyes, her soft lips parted in a slightly foolish but wonderfully endearing smile.

_Hideous,_ thought Blanca. Even disregarding the character’s actions, he perfectly despised the narrator. At every opportunity, he translated the people around him into hollow reflections of people, strawmen for populating his insular, cathectic little world. It was all hideously wasteful, among other things. Blanca was stirred to think of other, more familiar wastes in his life...it seemed that for his own purposes, the text made for a rather fine set of opera glasses, as well.

He glanced back at Ash. _What kind of person are you when you don’t have to act?_ he wondered. _What are you like in your own world?_

“Find anything?” he asked instead.

“Yeah. Two of them,” Ash said, pointing vaguely in the direction they were facing. Blanca squinted and saw one brown fleck against the brilliant blue.

“Two, you said?”

“Yeah. It’s like they’re flying on top of each other.” He glanced over at Blanca and passed over the glasses. “See that crescent?”

Blanca squinted into the lenses and scanned the sky for the birds. He caught sight of a tiny forked V wavering up and down. “It almost looks like a bat.”

“No way it’s a bat—it’s way too big. Besides, it’s the middle of the day.” Ash held out his hand and gestured impatiently for the spectacles. “There was only one at first, but then this other one came and started flying the same route.”

“Hmm. Perhaps they’re fighting.”

“They’re not fighting.” The way Ash said it sounded oddly frustrated or even disgusted.

Blanca sighed. “I really don’t know, Ash. Why don’t you keep watching?”

“Way ahead of you, old man,” he replied disinterestedly. That was just as well, Blanca thought, glancing back down to the book in his lap.

> “Talk, Lo—don’t grunt. Tell me something.”  
>  “What thing, Dad?” (she let the word expand with ironic deliberation).  
>  “Any old thing.”  
>  “Okay, if I call you that?” (eyes slit at the road).   
>  “Quite.”  
>  “It’s a sketch, you know.”

“They’re falling!” Ash startled, pulling Blanca back out of his book.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. Wait, they’re pulling up,” Ash reported. It was hard to tell behind the opera glasses, but he looked perturbed. “They keep dropping and coming back up together. I dunno. Maybe they’re fighting after all.”

Blanca tried to picture what Ash meant. Two birds flying parallel, diving and rising in tandem...it almost sounded like a courtship dance, or—ah! He remembered.

“They’re mating,” he said. Ash’s mouth dropped open.

“No way. There’s no way,” he repeated, lapsing into a whisper.

“NPR ran an article a couple of years ago—before I came to New York, actually,” he recalled. “There are some species of swifts that spend almost all of their lives on the wing. They even sleep in flight.”

“Why...?”

“Their wings are too long to land on the ground.” Blanca tilted his head back and looked up at the wavering brown fleck. “It’s the life they’re made for, I guess.”

“They’re beautiful.”

Blanca almost felt like he was trespassing when he tipped his head to the side. Ash’s face was lax with awe. Pink rings glowed under his eyes, and something glistened at the rim of the glasses and left tracks down his face. Blanca had never seen such a thing from Ash. He was loathe to disturb the boy’s reverie or revelation, whichever it might be. Either way, Blanca was struck with the same splendor as before, as the words “I don’t want to die” transformed before his eyes into two men on the forest floor, staring at something immeasurably high above them.

“I suppose they are,” he finally agreed, and returned to his reading.

_Karanga River - 13,100 feet_

“Welcome, sirs! What can we do for you?”

Despite calling itself a “boutique,” Fifty Grand was imposing and indeed grand, with lines of fine-threaded suits mobbing them in every direction. The back counter—solid oak—stood level with Blanca’s neck, and the clerk behind it was in a lofted chair particularly suitable for staring down at patrons.

Having assumed Ash would answer, Blanca stayed quiet a moment too long to sound natural. “Ah, my friend is looking for something casual,” he said abruptly, offering a weak smile.

Beside him, Ash fidgeted. He was wearing the same jeans and “I ♥ NY” t-shirt as the day before, which were both a little sweat-stained from their hike. Blanca hadn’t bothered getting together any luggage for Ash. After all, they couldn’t very well go back to retrieve his belongings, and Blanca didn’t want to buy the kid a new wardrobe without consulting him. By his sullen expression, Ash did not particularly want to be there...yet a man had to have clothes.

“Anything in particular?” The clerk visibly perused Ash. “Something to match your eyes, perhaps? Or—”

“No eyes and no hair,” Ash interrupted, offering no further guidance on the matter. The clerk wilted.

“I see. Well, then...we could start from an accessory and go from there,” he suggested. “What are your thoughts on scarves? Suit vests?”

Ash made a face. “I can live with glasses.”

“Right...something erudite, then,” the clerk muttered. “I’ll be back.”

Though he wouldn’t say it, Blanca felt a little embarrassed. He had a good working relationship with the staff here, and always showed his gratitude for their expertise...he hadn’t expected Ash to be so short with them. He knew Ash was stressed, and god only knew if he actually slept a wink the night before. Still, it was hard for Blanca to understand. Cordiality was the last of his own qualities to desert him.

Right then, Blanca felt a tug on his coat. He glanced over at Ash, surprised—he could hardly think of another action more unlike Ash.

“Can we go?” Eyes down, he scuffed the ground with his sneakers. ”This place is kinda uptight.”

Blanca gave him a puzzled little smile. “We could,” he offered, “but it would be rude. They’re already assisting us. Why not take a look at what they recommend?”

Stiffly, Ash dug his hands into his pockets.

 _I’ll let him pick the place for lunch,_ Blanca decided half-heartedly. He was patient, but otherwise unsure of how to ameliorate tensions when he couldn’t quite put a finger on them.

They only had to wait a couple of minutes before the clerk returned with jewel-tone cardigans, khakis, collared shirts, chain-knit sweaters, and a wool overcoat Ash would certainly hate wearing in such a climate. Still, Blanca had to commend the salesman for his excellent judgment. These were the types of items that were available in a myriad of colors; finding a single sweater that fit nicely could lead to them walking out with six or seven.

“I’m a medium,” Ash stated plainly. “15.5 in UK sizes. 40 in Euro. 42 in French,” he added, uttering the last word with a foul expression.

“Right. I believe I’ve brought a couple things…” the clerk dropped the armful of garments onto the oak counter and began sorting through, looking rather harried as he dug around for labels.

Blanca tried to conceal his dismay. “You’re not going to try them on?” he asked tentatively.

Ash shook his head. “There’s not much of a point, is there?”

“To the contrary,” the clerk chimed in, “you’ll find our clothing has many options for length, width, and sleeve style. It’s quite difficult to predict which specifications will look best on your physique.”

“Physique,” Ash echoed quietly. His shoulders, Blanca noticed, were locked up with some kind of nervous, hostile energy, the likes of which Blanca hadn’t seen since they arrived in the Caribbean. It was one of Ash’s tells. A hazy idea about what was happening began to form in his mind.

“Oh, shoot,” Blanca said, pulling out his cell phone. “What day—it’s really Monday? Ah.”

The clerk blinked politely. “Is something the matter, sir?”

“But this never happens...it seems I’ve double-booked myself.” He gave a flustered laugh to sell the lie. “I’m so sorry. Would it be all right if we put the size 40’s on hold? I can come back in on...Wednesday, I believe.”

“That’s quite all right,” the clerk reassured him. “No trouble at all. Come back whenever you like.”

“I so appreciate it. Good afternoon.” Blanca tipped his hat. Ash cut in front of him to thrust open the glass double doors and storm through them.

Blanca nearly had to run to catch up to him. He kept a pace or two behind, though curiosity and concern demanded in equal parts that he get a proper look at the boy. It was hard to tell in movement, but from what Blanca could discern, Ash had broken a sweat.

They walked for a good ten minutes (which practically put them on the outskirts of the small downtown) before, as abruptly as he’d started, Ash stopped. A few feet shy of him, Blanca followed suit. The pavement gave way to knee-high grass on either side, hiding wild frogs that continued their merry racket.

For a moment, he stayed quiet and observed. The boy’s frame did not shake. It hardly stirred. The fixed, pale quality of his limbs suggested something hypothermic. His breaths came like afterthoughts.

“Ash,” he tried, speaking only loud enough to be heard. “Where are you right now?”

Ash offered him no acknowledgment. His hands drew up towards his chest and arms, and he came to hold himself woodenly. No other movement; not a sound.

“Come on. You can talk to me,” Blanca urged softly. “I already know. Remember?”

His shoulders rose with a sharp, deliberate breath. “Wish I had a gun,” he said instead.

“A gun?” Blanca didn’t hide the surprise in his voice. “But you said you didn’t want one. You—”

“—I _know_ ,” Ash said tightly. “I don’t. But I’m _losing it_ without one.”

“Oh,” said Blanca, aching for him.

“I shoot better than they do. That’s all I’ve got—that’s the only thing standing between now and then.”

“Oh, Ash,” he repeated.

“This is humiliating,” Ash stated, staring off blankly. “The second I’m not fighting for my life, I can’t even buy a fucking shirt. Thank god Eiji can’t see me now.”

“I know. It’s going to be like this for a little while, Ash.” Blanca watched his shoulders sag, and wished he had something wiser to say. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t get it,” Ash snapped with the sudden vigor of a coiled spring. “I don’t get you _._ How can you act like you’re just walking in on this? You _knew,_ and you let it happen, and you left me to the wolves—a-and you _laughed_ at me when you came back! And _now_ you want to pretend to be all sympathetic? What the hell are you playing at? You could have killed any of them, any time, and gotten away with it—so don’t tell me you’re _sorry._ You all but did it to me yourself.” He glowered for a beat. “Say something, damn it!”

Blanca, almost thankful for his upbringing in moments like this, had let his face fall into a neutral half-smile throughout Ash’s tirade. Trying not to smart, he felt uncomfortably close to the polite guise he’d worn around Golzine’s estate.

“If that was intended to devastate me,” he replied, slowly and levelly, “you’ve done quite well, Ash, though I’m well aware of everything you’ve said. I certainly owe you a conversation—probably an apology, as well. However, right now, I am concerned for you, as nonsensical as that may seem, and I would like to do whatever is in my power to help you.”

“You can’t help me.”

“Then I’ll stay with you.”

“You’re so _late_ ,” Ash mumbled. Something in his face cracked, and he brought a hand up to cover it.

Blanca watched him steadily. “I know.”

For a minute or two, they stayed in that position—Ash fracturing, Blanca watching—and everything was completely silent, save for the frogs. It was lonely. Blanca was still new to loneliness, widowed for only a few years and paying attention for fewer, but it was so much more palpable when he saw it in his student. He wished he better understood. He wished the old books rang out for him more clearly, or endowed him with better words.

“...let me use you.”

That startled Blanca. “How do you mean?” he asked, carefully masking his dread as, head down, Ash stumbled closer, reaching out with practiced hands, grabbing a fistful of Blanca’s shirt—

—and then a forehead thudded against his shoulder, and Blanca felt a deep, uneven sigh against his chest.

Gently at first, in case he was mistaken, Blanca lifted his arms around the wavering body. Then, muscle memory tightened his embrace. He felt Ash’s weight falter against him, and slowly guided them both onto their knees.

“Sorry,” said Ash. It came out muffled. “Sorry. I know what you thought I meant.”

“I understand,” he assured him quickly. He felt compelled to apologize, but a whole-body shudder from Ash subsumed him with fresh concern. “You’re all right,” he said, trying not to sound frantic.

“I know that. Logically, anyway.” There was another moment of quiet. Blanca could hear him draw air through his nose, and felt it as a warm puff, seconds later. His next words were completely hidden in fabric. “Couldn’t stand that salesman. People like him—I’m used to them being in on it.”

“Mm,” Blanca agreed. It had never crossed his mind that something as normal and enjoyable to him as a custom fitting might have been so exploitable, but he certainly could see where someone like Marvin might see an opportunity.

“I should get over it.”

“Eventually. Maybe.” Blanca mulled another idea over. “I suppose you don’t have to. Personally, I would find it hard to settle down with too many sources of discomfort still...out there. But it’s up to you. Perhaps you don’t have a use for snobbish European clothing.”

Ash barked out laughing. “You’re right. I never want to wear that shit again.”

“Fine. Less competition for me.”

More laughter. “Yeah. You’re all right, Blanca.” Quiet. A sigh. “I shouldn’t have said that stuff.”

Blanca sighed, too. “Don’t apologize for that. It was true.”

“Not really. You’re not the same, I mean.”

He hummed noncommittally, and Ash jerked away from him.

“I’m serious!” he said, almost glaring. “You treat me like an actual person. Not like a thing, or a criminal, or an idol. You’re a real ass sometimes, but that’s—I’ve had maybe three or four other people treat me that way in the last _decade._ And two of them are dead, and one’s in Japan.”

“Ash,” Blanca responded, matching his seriousness. “I’m not going to kick you out, or leave, just because—”

“You’re impossible,” Ash interrupted, scowling, and leapt to his feet. “That wasn’t a _you’re all I have left_ confession. I’m trying to tell you I’m _grateful,_ dumbass!” And he stalked off with all the anger of another diatribe.

“Ah, sorry...” Blanca would have called after him, but he had no idea what to do with Ash’s gratitude. He didn’t know how to receive something so unwarranted. It left him with the sensation of water slipping out of his hands.

_High Camp at Barafu - 15,239 feet_

“Oh, my word. Girls, look who it is!”

When Blanca found himself out for the night, it never took long for his friends to find him, too. He supposed he wasn’t very hard to descry, even in the dim lighting at Nyx, but he was still awfully pleased that they made it so easy to meet. Turning around, he saw three figures outlined in pink from the neon signage, and all at once felt glossed lips touch his jaw and leave a cool trail to his neck.

Well…“friends.”

The kisser pulled away in a cloud of copper hair. “Hey, handsome. Who’s the kid?”

“Moira, this is Ash. Ash, I’d like you to meet the three loveliest women in the islands.”

“That’s nice, dear,” said a woman in shades. Blanca didn’t have to see her eyes to know they were rolling. “But you still haven’t told us who’s your _favorite._ All talk.”

“But Dexie, I’ve told you,” Blanca laughed charmingly, “it’s like apples and oranges! There’s no sensible way to go about it. I feel like Paris and Sisyphus, all at once.”

“Ho-hum,” she scoffed, smiling.

“Ash, huh?” The third woman, wearing fine, two-toned silk, seemed to appraise the boy. “Aren’t you cute. Is he shy, Blanca?”

“He hasn’t been on the town yet,” Blanca answered, “so I thought we could show him a good time. But Ash can speak for himself, of course.”

“It’s a pleasure,” Ash said mildly. When he next caught Blanca’s eye, he gave him a look of bewilderment.

It had been a week or so, now, since their arrival. Blanca had been careful to give Ash space, and aside from eating a meal or two together everyday, they spent most of their time apart. Blanca had no idea what Ash was busying himself with, though he knew from the rickety front door that he was occasionally leaving the house. That was fine. He hoped he’d get to learn more as time went on and Ash settled in, but for the time being, he didn’t want to disturb anything in the works. Still, he felt an obligation to introduce Ash to the other side of the islands, and when offered the invitation for a night out, Ash had shown interest, surprisingly enough. Perhaps he hadn’t foreseen Blanca’s popularity.

“A good time? Yes, I think we could do that,” Moira agreed.

Dexie spared Blanca a meaningful glance. “Isn’t he a little young?”

“I drink in the Americas,” Ash started, but she was already shaking her head.

“No, dear. I mean for _you,”_ she said dryly.

“A-absolutely not. I mean, we are not involved,” Blanca stammered, watching Ash turn slightly red. “At all.”

“Sexually, you mean,” Moira amended gently.

“Yes, right.”

“You’re so much cuter when you’re flustered,” Dexie said, smiling a little nastily, “and not full of shit. I know Moira likes a schmoozer, but when you’re earnest…”

Blanca chuckled, leaning in a bit. This close, he could see Dexie’s eyelashes through the glasses. “Just ask,” he murmured.

“Uh,” Ash cleared his throat, _“can I get you all anything?_ From the bar?”

“It’s Nana,” said the rose-silk woman, “and I’ll take a scotch. Don’t worry about those two. They’ll need a menu.”

“That’s very gracious of you, Ash, but I’ll wait to order as well.” Preoccupied with thumbing Dexie’s chin (the lighting gave her skin a peculiar, warm shadow), Blanca spared Ash a glance, fully expecting the irritated glare. “Get whatever you’d like. Just tell the bar hand to put it under my name, all right?”

“Of course, Mr. Blanca,” mocked Ash in a sweet voice, storming off with audible steps. Blanca felt Dexie laugh under his hand.

“So that’s the prodigy.” Nana, the shyest of the three, betrayed her fascination. “You made him sound more…”

“Pitiful?” said Dexie.

“Volatile?” said Moira.

“Serious,” said Nana, with a contented expression.

“I must be bad at talking about people when they’re not here,” Blanca laughed a little uneasily. 

With these women, he found himself prone to dangerous sincerity. He had met them shortly after he first arrived in the Caribbean, and had enjoyed quite a few soirées with them since. Despite his faith in his own discretion, he’d still refused to share too much of his life with them; he loved these three a little too much to make the same mistakes over again. 

“No.” Dexie gave him a bright look of appraisal. “I think you were worried about him.”

Against his better judgment, Blanca still offered the girls snapshots of the people in his life that weighed on him, or pulled him in different directions. They had accepted his enigmatic background, although they occasionally tried to tease out details (with no success). The people, though, they had demanded from him—what kinds of people did he love? Hate? Admire? Oh, he was tense tonight—who was he thinking of? Who gave him that sad look in his eye?

He preferred to listen, of course. Dexie was angry, mostly about things in the past that she’d refused to feel bitter about until now; Nana was concerned about people in the city she’d left behind, whose lives had either fallen apart or moved on entirely without her; and Moira entered deep slumps of indecision and dejection, continually disappointed by fall-throughs and backtracks that always seemed unjustified to Blanca and the others. He was grateful for their intimacy. Listening to them, and occasionally being able to do something for them, was the only time Blanca felt properly human.

“I’m certain you’re right,” he admitted, keeping his voice low. “Not that it does much good.”

“Guilty,” Nana said, too easily, and Moira hummed in agreement.

He heard Ash say “excuse me” from out of view, and caught a glimpse of blonde hair near the bar. He always looked so natural, regardless of his environment. Blanca, meanwhile, could remember his first visit to Nyx—without an assignment, he had resorted to watching tourists order their drinks and make idle chit-chat. He’d been starving for knowledge of such menial things. It wasn’t that he’d had an inability to do either; to the contrary, he could have worn a hundred different demeanors and thrown himself into the thick of it. But there was a certain mindset of artificiality and utility that he was running away from, which left him afraid of wearing any of those masks...he was still trying to learn if that was a rare or common dilemma to have.

“Oh, a question,” Moira said as she began to dig around in her purse for something. “You said the boy was being ‘returned’ to a certain man…”

“I had a change of heart,” he answered, staying ambiguous more for Ash’s privacy than his own.

“I get the feeling that’s a good thing.” She produced a couple of cigarettes, took both to her mouth, and lit them. “Still not a smoker, Blanc?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Good. Stay golden.” Moira handed one off to Dexie. “Did I ever tell you how I started?”

“Not before tonight,” Blanca prompted, all too eager to settle in for an anecdote with something on the rocks. He caught a cloud of Moira’s smoke and drank in the scent of it, as she opened her mouth and a furious voice pierced across the room.

“Do not _touch_ me!”

A few seconds elapsed. Blanca was able only to string together a few snapshots, piecewise. There had been a moment of total soundlessness, despite the moving mouths and blaring lights around him, and an aisle of stop-motion tourists parted before him as though someone had thrown them out of the way. He could not hear his footsteps. He couldn’t make a sound.

He had stopped moving. His arm was outstretched, weighed down, and its shadow was too thick to be his. He was looking into the face of a man. His hand terminated in the face of a man, whose feet were off the ground. His hand was around his neck. His palm was around something warm, pulsing, as fragile as an eggshell.

“Big guy?” To his left was the bartender. He was giving Blanca an awfully funny look. “You wanna put him down, now?”

Blanca felt like laughing but couldn’t move his face. He was horrified. Put him down? He wasn’t quite sure he could. How many times had he been in this position, anyway? With his body, and his hands, how different was this from walking next to a man at the supermarket? How different were people from cartons of eggs? 

Hemingway couldn’t understand him. Nabokov couldn’t understand him. Those men were able to be touched by the finer parts of the world, to carry that lightness of hand into their penmanship, their passions, their loves and admirations...but he, Blanca, was not made for this world, when merely clenching his fist had destroyed far better men. There was no hierarchy of beauty, rectitude, or refinement in his world. There was only the hierarchy that lifted some men off the ground, and gave other men the hands to crush them. His world was bleak, and he was a terror. 

“Let me through,” he heard Ash say from somewhere behind him, and then, “Blanca?”

 _Are you all right?_ is what Blanca wanted to ask. But at the same time, he had the compulsion to break this man’s neck, watch the strangers around him faint in horror, blow like a cold front through the airport and into the vast, white heart of the Alps, and find a nice, secluded villa to starve in.

“Blanca,” repeated Ash, and though Blanca wasn’t looking at him (he was looking at the thick, reddened neck he was strangling), he was stirred by his student’s voice. It was quiet, and sounded almost pleading. “Knock it off.”

Blanca clenched his teeth.

“I don’t want to live like this anymore. Come on.” The pulse beat crazily in his palm, like a siren’s song—but he heard Ash. “I don’t want to be a demon. I don’t want to go back to that. But I don’t know how else to live. You still have to show me.” Over the sounds of the choked-out retching, he still could hear Ash’s breathing, shallow and tense. “Don’t make me go back. I’ll never forgive you.”

Something painful in Blanca’s heart stirred to wakefulness. He closed his eyes, and felt one pang of contrition, more perfect than he had ever felt before in his life. As though he’d been scalded, he dropped the man and jerked away from him. He stared at his hand, still half-curled around empty air.

“I have to go,” said Blanca, and no sooner had he said it than he was outside, Ash skirting out the door with his coat a moment later, hailing a taxi with Blanca’s fedora.

He joined Ash in the back seat and listed off the address of the villa automatically. Thankful to be out of the public eye, he sank into the leather cushions and moaned. “Jesus.”

Ash seemed to be avoiding looking at him, and even sounded a little uncertain when he spoke. “I’ve never seen you like that before.”

“I don’t know what that was.” 

Blanca contemplated his irrationality for a moment. It wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to him. He felt he’d had rudimentary flares of anger before, but to be so overcome...so many times, he had seen injustice or cruelty and never felt so commanded by passion or out of control. He was a little in awe of himself, and not in an entirely bad way.

He glanced over at Ash, who had his head against the window, and felt a little selfish for it. Regardless of how angry or indignant he was, he could have averted the situation with next to no fuss; the fact that he hadn’t was an entirely self-indulgent, shameful matter.

“I appreciate what you did for me, Ash,” Blanca said, “even though I should have been the one helping you. You’re all right?”

Ash turned back from the window with wide eyes. “Me?” he asked, astonished. “...I mean, yeah. He only cupped my ass. It was over with pretty fast.”

Blanca sighed. “Everything’s relative,” he acknowledged, “as much as I hate to hear it.” He tried for a smile, stiffening his lip to hide the guilt from his face.

His hand, fluttering open and closed on his knee, could still feel the phantom skin of the man, its feverish half-life...he almost expected to find a mark across his errant palm. There were parables, he recalled, of sinners touched by holy water, burned and redeemed in the same act of scarification. Scars aside, he felt the same. In that handful of strides across the room, he had glimpsed just how possible it had been, over all those years, for him to shake off inertia and take the future into his own brutish hands. Or maybe it hadn’t been possible; perhaps, for all that time, he had been just shy of human. But now, he was a man—a wretched, uncultivated excuse for a man—and yet a man. 

“Blanca, thank you,” Ash blurted, still wearing that tentative expression that looked so strange on him. “For getting pissed about it. I don’t care about the rest of it, so don’t thank me, okay?”

Something about that put Blanca almost at ease, and while he didn’t understand fully, he understood enough. “Of course,” he said to everything at once, his face and his words flushing with warmth.

_Stella Point - 18,652 feet_

Whenever Blanca heard Ash’s clunking footsteps, he knew to slide from his seat on the old, sun-bleached couch in the living room, and would settle onto the sheepskin rug and wait for the boy to come in. Ash could move as quietly as he wanted, and was generally discreet about where he was in the house, probably more out of habit than anything else. Footsteps had become another language between the two of them.

Today, as with many days, Ash came in scowling, and threw himself over the back of the sofa.

“Why is Japanese so hard?” he groaned.

Blanca lit up. “So that’s what you’ve been up to.”

“Not _just_ that,” Ash corrected him, a little defensively. “But also, duh.”

“I suppose it makes quite a bit of sense for you.” Blanca flipped the page of his book (still _Lolita,_ though he was nearing the end) and thought about how to show his support. “Would you like a tutor?”

“Ew. Definitely not.” Blanca heard Ash shifting on the cushions. That was part of their implicit arrangement. Blanca faced forward, and listened to his student speak behind his head. He took care never to carry their conversations beyond the couch, either; there was a time and a place, and this was theirs. “You know my luck with tutors. I’m sure Dino told you plenty.”

“You’re not wrong,” Blanca replied, “but you’d be surprised what I don’t know.”

“Really,” Ash said. A curious lilt had made its way into his voice. “What do you want to know?”

Blanca was hardly able to believe he’d heard him right. They had been growing more and more open with each other over the past month, sure, but he would never have expected such a blatant invitation. 

“Well, for starters,” he said, trying not to sound too dumb-founded, “I still don’t know how exactly you met Golzine.”

Ash was quiet for a spell. Blanca was afraid he’d somehow overstepped, or that Ash had been bluffing willingness, and had been expecting Blanca not to take him up on it. But Ash spoke up again before he had a chance to retract his question.

“I just noticed something. You call him ‘Golzine’ now.” He could picture Ash’s smirk.

“I suppose I do.”

“I was a little afraid you’d call him ‘monsieur’ for the rest of our lives.”

“Yes, well.” Blanca smiled with distaste. “I can think of a time when I probably would have.” He heard a soft snort. Things faded back into silence for a moment, although Blanca could tell from the stilted evenness of the breathing behind him that Ash intended to talk.

“I told you Marvin’s the one that brought me to him. I got caught as a runaway.” He paused. “I guess you don’t know about that, either.”

“Actually, I pieced that part together,” Blanca corrected him gently. “Baseball, right?”

“Ha. See what I mean? You know plenty.” Ash drew a slow, composed breath. “From then on, it was the full works. Kinks, cameras—all that shit. They traded back some of our freedom for a good show, so I got pretty good at it. I wasn’t roaming around the city for long before Golzine started singling me out. That’s where you come in.”

“Now I see.” Up until recently, Blanca had known about Club Cod only in the vaguest possible terms. Knowing Golzine’s tendency towards the extravagant, he had assumed the enterprise could claim some level of tastefulness; when Max Lobo’s reports started coming out, he realized how mistaken his assumptions had been.

“Yeah. There were times I could have gotten out,” Ash admitted, which came to Blanca’s surprise. “There was a window when nobody could get to me—they didn’t know about any easy hostages or anything, I mean. I could’ve gotten halfway across the country before they even knew to look for me. God,” he sighed lightly, in good humor. “I was such an idiot.”

“You stayed, then?”

“I guess I had to, at that point. Started hustling to make enough money for Griff.”

“Your brother, right?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I remember you said he died. Is that for certain? I thought he was MIA.”

For a moment, Ash stopped replying. Then, he made a small, troubling noise. “No. I mean, he’s not missing. I know he’s dead. I just realized—I never found out where he’s buried.”

“Oh,” said Blanca.

“I mean, I’m sure I could find out. The NYPD must have that information somewhere.”

Blanca took a moment of pause. Why would Griffin have died in New York? “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

He felt Ash’s head jerk behind him, and the cushions shifted. “Golzine really didn’t tell you?” His voice came from somewhere higher, as though he was propped upright. “After you left, I got word that my brother was discharged. They said he’d had a breakdown, but he was completely vegetative...they used him as a lab rat for ‘banana fish,’ that psychotropic drug I had to steal Max’s report on when—whatever. That’s what killed him, too,” he added, strained with anger. “I got my hands on a sample of ‘banana fish.’ Golzine sent some guys while I was in prison to get it back. That’s when they shot him.”

As Ash spoke, Blanca’s dread had increased tenfold. He felt cold. _All you have to do is give one thing up,_ he had said. He hadn’t understood anything.

“I’m sorry, Ash.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t know.”

Perhaps, Blanca mused, it was necessity that guided his belief that he knew Ash well. It was only human to long for that feeling of closeness or kinship with another person, and while Blanca had met others since he’d left America (three beauties included), he’d always left Ash in the back of his mind as his ace in the hole. The secret understanding of two brothers branded by the same iron—that was his stalwart bond. He could rely on Ash, oceans away, to stay alive for him.

So he’d thought. Now that he was peering into the shape and color of Ash’s person, so reticently exposed, he realized not only how he’d used that persistent will as a crutch for himself, but also how wholly he’d failed to understand it. What he’d assumed to be mere survival had actually been bent towards another person, all that time; what he’d taken to be personal vengeance had been at least partly on another’s behalf. He’d always anticipated Ash having his life—always feared it—and only now could he see how absurd that was. Only now, with his back to his student, close enough to smell the salt sticking to his hair, could Blanca perceive the rolling distance between them.

“Would you have done anything differently?” he heard Ash ask the ceiling. “If you’d known.”

“I wish I could say yes.”

Ash chuckled, perhaps sincerely. “Figures. At least you’re honest about it.”

Blanca hesitated to say what next came to his mind, because he wasn’t certain if he was reading too much into Ash’s comment. He was afraid the question might come off as accusatory, as well, regardless of the genuine curiosity that inspired it. Still, when a silence began to grow again between them, he broke it.

“Do you wish you’d done anything differently?”

There was only a blink of quiet between the question and the answer. “Well, yeah,” Ash started, sounding a little uncertain. “Basically everything. I should have been smarter about Griff. Probably Eiji, too. I mean, I guess things kind of worked out with him. But he could have died. A lot of people _did_ die because I was careless with him. From the very first day—Skip, Shorter…”

Blanca began to regret the question. It seemed like a pointless exercise in pain at this point.

“...but if that’s what it took to meet Eiji,” Ash continued, an ambiguous tension building in his voice, “I...I can’t make myself regret it. It’s just like Lao said. All that for one person...but he’s the only good thing I had. Without him, there wouldn’t be anything good in my life now, either. If anyone else was in my place,” he paused, seeming to fumble for words, “I guess I’d blame them, but I’d also feel bad about it.”

“Mm-hmm,” Blanca responded, also finding it hard to know exactly what to say. He wondered if he felt anything at all like regret in his sea of guilt, either. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think wishing the past were different is a very productive use of anyone’s time.”

“But I don’t want to make the same mistakes again,” Ash protested.

“Perhaps you won’t.” Blanca thought of Natasha, and held her memory close to his chest. “It might not always be just one person, either. Some people are...prismatic. If you’re lucky enough to get close to them, you can see their beauty in other places. With the right person, you could probably learn to love just about anyone.”

He felt embarrassed after he spoke. “Love”? What an absurd word for him to have used. Not that he took it to be inaccurate, exactly, but the way people used it made it out to be something pure and guiltless, and far away. And even mentioning it to Ash felt like it might be an overstep...

“Prisms, huh?” Ash said quietly. “Those girls we met the other night—are they your kind of ‘prisms’?”

“Ah,” Blanca exclaimed, struck dumb by the question. “Ah, if you’re asking if I have ‘feelings’ for them—”

“No,” Ash interrupted, “I’m asking if you _love_ them.” His voice was teasing, but his words were pushy, or even a challenge. They taunted Blanca with his own sanguinity, which, when reflected back at him, looked awfully dishonest.

 _Probably not,_ he thought, holding a thousand selfish thoughts in his mind.

“Who knows?” he said instead, forcing himself not to grow overly serious.

Ash sighed with discontent. “Blanca,” he said, and stopped. “Sergei,” he started again, “I’ve known you for four years and I hardly know a goddamn thing about you. I don’t even know why you knew Golzine, or worked for him—and I still followed you to the Bahamas! I don’t really mind this whole…” he trailed off momentarily. “I don’t mind talking to you. But don’t you think I deserve a little _quid pro quo_ after everything?”

Blanca’s heart pulled a little. He might have assumed that Ash wanted information to even the scales, to make him the vulnerable party for once, but he couldn’t quite believe it. It sounded too different from their strategic conversations, too much like those women reclining in his sheets, looking up at him with warm curiosity, only it was as Ash had said: there was nothing to protect Ash from, and everything Blanca owed him. Now, only one person in the world—Yut Lung—knew everything about him, had every reason to destroy Blanca’s peace and chase him back into war, and yet had not. Now was the freest Blanca had ever been to speak about his own life.

“I will tell you everything,” said Blanca, the words coming sweetly of their own accord.

_Uhuru Peak - 19,341 feet_

“I slept with Nana,” said Ash casually over breakfast.

Blanca’s free hand paused over the sausage he was cutting. He could tell that Ash was looking for a response, but was at a loss for what kind of reaction he was expecting. In truth, he was shocked—he couldn’t make sense of Ash being interested in anyone but Eiji—but he was also a little relieved. He did not often find himself preoccupied with Ash’s private affairs, but perhaps unconsciously, he had anticipated Ash having more difficulties with physical relationships. If he had sought out something, it was potentially a good sign.

Placidly, Blanca settled on “Congratulations,” and glanced up from the last chapter of his book to gauge whether his endorsement was adequate. Ash, not quite looking across the kitchen booth at him, was sawing into a stack of pancakes and eating none of it.

“Wasn’t sure if you’d be mad,” he said.

“Of course not,” Blanca assured him. Something about Ash’s words and flat tone made him oddly uncomfortable. He glanced back down at the book in the lap of his terry cloth robe, but his attention wavered.

After a brief while, Ash spoke again. “I wouldn’t blame you.”

Blanca let his gaze flicker back up to Ash, who looked more aloof than perturbed. 

“I mean,” Ash said, “it’s kind of gross, isn’t it?”

“Gross?”

“Sharing with me.”

Blanca stopped himself from physically recoiling. “I don’t feel that way about it,” he replied evenly. “She is a wonderful, caring woman with a lot of love to give.”

At this point in their relationship, Blanca could well imagine the types of insecurities driving their situation to a conflict. He understood that the way Ash was talking was a product of things he’d suffered, and things he wasn’t responsible for. To him, it might seem entirely a matter of course to negotiate a right to another person. Perhaps it was unfair that Blanca, who spent the majority of his life counting cash over dead bodies, couldn’t find a stomach for such things anymore. Nevertheless, he couldn’t tolerate it, and was quite ready for their conversation to be over.

“I just don’t understand,” continued Ash, “how you can be all right with using the same hole—”

“Ash!” Blanca snapped his book shut and did not hide how furious he was. “That is a _horrible_ thing to say.”

“Who cares? It’s true.”

“No, it’s absurd,” he replied, louder than intended. “How can you, of all people, talk about another human being like that? _Holes._ Do you know what you sound like?” He ignored the outrage that split across Ash’s face, and cut him off before he had the chance to speak. “You need to watch yourself, Ash. We’re all entitled to self-loathing, but not like this.”

“Shut up,” Ash said, now standing, face darkening with rage. “Shut your damn mouth. You have no goddamn right to talk like you know anything.”

“Really? Enlighten me,” Blanca said, more scathingly than he should have, and more coldly than he meant. 

“You don’t know shit,” Ash said, and struck the wall faster than Blanca could think. He drew his fist back and sent it smashing into the brick facade again, and again, and again, leaving dark smudges that grew larger with every strike.

“Ash, stop!”

Ash didn’t stop. “Nothing was different,” he shouted between blows. “It was just like when someone was making me do it. It felt horrible. She told me it wasn’t working out, and I stopped, and I felt horrible because _I_ asked _her,_ and she was so _nice_ about it, and now I’m—”

“Stop, stop,” Blanca pleaded, alarmed. “Please stop, Ash. You’re destroying your hand.”

“Oh,” said Ash, and stopped long enough to examine his hand, holding it up to the kitchen chandelier. “I don’t really care.”

“But I do,” Blanca insisted. Ash still looked ambivalent. “Please. What’s the hand done, anyway?”

That this was a joke seemed to register slowly for Ash. He laughed. “Jesus,” he said, and laughed again, more quietly, and then the laughing slipped into something else just as quickly as it had started. Blanca didn’t catch it immediately, and when he did, he didn’t believe it at first. He would have doubted his ears, if not for the subdued jerking of Ash’s shoulders, and his eyes, if not for the uneven, wet breaths that were too sharp not to notice.

“Ash—”

“Ah, shit. It’s not even 9:30,” he said. Aside from the cracking of his voice, he sounded hardly different from a person who had knocked something off a table, frustrated and amused at once. Without turning away from the smudge on the wall, he glanced at Blanca and smiled tightly in apology.

Blanca was a little mortified. He had seen Ash upset before, but always with the kind of restraint that said _do only what’s necessary_ and _spare me my pride._ Never, he realized, had he seen Ash so open as now—not prone, not a 14-year-old pinned to a bed frame—but upright, freely bearing the wounds on his body and the load across his back. For a moment, all thoughts of comfort fled his mind. 

“You are so different,” he marveled quietly.

“No, I’m not,” Ash said thickly. “I’m still horrible.”

“No.”

“I am. I’m a horrible person.”

“No, you’re not. You’re a fine person.” Blanca steepled his hands, controlling his sympathy and trying to speak from a place of reason and earnestness. “I don’t think a horrible person could feel the sheer amount of guilt you do. Praising and detesting yourself at the right times, and for the right reasons, are part of being responsible for yourself. You’ll always be admirable if you live like that.”

“That isn’t enough,” Ash scoffed. “People just...give me things, without asking for anything. I don’t know what to do for them. And I can’t be like them—so what am I even good for?”

“I don’t believe for a second that you’re incapable of generosity,” Blanca persisted. “You gave up so much for Eiji—and for Griffin. Really, Ash, you gave yourself up to a monster for them, more than once. I don’t think you’ll have any problem learning smaller gestures of benevolence. You probably already do them without thinking.”

Ash brought a thumb to one of his eyes and wiped it brusquely. “Yeah, I guess,” he said, and swallowed. “Chrissakes this is dumb.”

“No, it’s all right.” Blanca reached out and beckoned for his injured hand. He steadied it gently on both sides and glanced over the scrapes and gashes, which thankfully weren’t bleeding very much, although they still looked very painful. He’d split most of the knuckles on the hand. “No more punching walls, okay? It never makes anything better.”

Ash laughed colorlessly. “Sure,” he offered, his agreement halfhearted. To Blanca’s surprise, he didn’t pull away. 

“Does it hurt?”

“Yeah. Duh.” Ash stared dully at the rawness of the wounds. “I have no idea why I said all that crap. I don’t actually…”

“I know.”

“I just want to be able to do it right for Eiji,” he said, desperation leaching into his voice. “And I don’t want it to suck forever. I can’t be normal about it. It’s always going through the motions and not thinking.”

That was only natural for a person in Ash’s circumstances, Blanca supposed. To try to shrug off years of trauma within the span of a night, and with almost a perfect stranger to boot—now that he was thinking about it, it was a badly rushed approach. At the same time, if Ash intended to see Eiji again, intended to be intimate with him, and intended all of this to happen relatively soon, he couldn’t bring himself to discourage that. The better he came to know Ash, the surer Blanca felt that Eiji was as essential to his future as north to a compass. 

“What’s it like when it’s not awful?”

The question was posed with so much tension and uncertainty that Blanca didn’t dare look up. He settled for brushing his thumb over his student’s hand, hoping that the gesture wouldn’t offend him.

“Well, good...I think it’s a little like when food is good. There’s no one perfect dish. It all depends on the other person, and what suits them.” 

Blanca thought about a night in smoke, months ago, when he had only just received Golzine’s summons. He remembered how the sloes of dread made it hard to speak, or even to change the lines on his face...Moira had touched him differently, that night. _Don’t talk,_ she’d told him, kissing his fingertips so sweetly he could cry. _We mustn’t lie to each other in here._

“It’s strange,” he mused. “It’s a very physical, sensual pleasure, but...it’s also pleasurable _because_ it’s pleasurable. We want other people to know us, but we’re scared of being known. We might even be skeptical that it’s possible. But when another person takes your body so seriously, and learns all of its ins and outs just to please you, it’s easier to believe that they care for you in a real way. It’s hard to fake that kind of attention. Maybe it tells you nothing about the other person’s character, or whether or not they’re good for you, but you can count on the fact that you are important to them.”

He felt Ash’s hand tighten into a vice grip on one of his own, and glanced back up at him. He had paled—not dramatically, but enough to show.

“That sounds like the worst,” he said without a trace of humor.

“It’s just my view,” Blanca added quickly, anxious not to set Ash off twice in a morning. “Do you want to sit back down?”

His words hung completely unaddressed until he scooted over slightly on his booth cushion. He’d only intended to jostle Ash out of his momentary stupor, but Ash responded by dropping his hand and sliding into the booth next to him. Blanca hesitated to see if he’d say anything more, and was met with yet another silence.

“I wonder if it’d be easier,” Blanca ventured, “if you were the one doing the pleasing.”

Ash was looking down at Blanca’s breakfast. “Hm.”

“Food for thought, I guess.”

“No,” Ash said, and slowly began to nod. “I think you’re right. The stuff you said—it wouldn’t bother me if it was someone else. I...kinda get it. But I can’t even _think_ about the other way around.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“It’s just…hell, I don’t know, Sergei.” Ash withdrew, looking as he normally did when he was getting ready to break away abruptly. Blanca wondered if he had reservations he wasn’t willing to voice, or if there were some he wasn’t even able to identify.

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” he said, picking up his fork. “As long as you’re with a person who cares for you, who you can communicate with, you’ll find something that works for you.”

Something about that had caught Ash’s attention, it seemed. He stared at Blanca for a moment before his eyes fell back to the table. 

“When I was with Golzine the second time,” he said, “I thought a lot about Eiji’s hometown. He told me people call it the land of the gods.” His voice lacked the resolution that came with his cooler manner. It was soft, and surprisingly brittle. “There are eight million gods in Japan. Even one for toilets...maybe he won’t care too much that I’m like this, if he comes from somewhere like that.”

“I don’t think he’ll mind at all. He doesn’t strike me as the type.” Blanca’s hand hovered over his plate, indecisive. “And you’re not a—you’re not difficult to love, Ash. Or to admire. I wish you could see yourself from the outside, sometimes.”

“Well, there’s nothing like that on the inside,” Ash said bitterly. “I can promise you that much.”

Blanca sighed. “I doubt that very much.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“I’m just being honest.” He scooped eggs onto his fork and took a bite. They were cold, and had taken on a rubbery texture. “Do you know if we have any Raisin Bran in the other room?”

He didn’t get an answer. He was about to get up and check himself, but he was stopped by a red-knuckled hand fisted in the sleeve of his robe. He paused, somewhere between sitting and standing, felt another arm around him, and welcomed Ash into his side. Lightly, with one arm, he embraced his student. He felt how massive he was, and how tense Ash was—not moving, hardly breathing.

“Everything okay?” Blanca heard him hiss out an exhale. “Ash?”

“Please stop talking. Don’t move.” He felt Ash’s chest expanding, and then slowly deflating. “Sorry. This is pushing it for me. Can’t get my body to relax.”

 _Don’t torture yourself,_ Blanca wanted to say. But he obediently kept his mouth shut.

“I’m still kind of a mess,” Ash said, slowly, “and I know I look like a basket case half the time. But I, uh...it’s been really good, being here. I’ve had time to think through everything, and a lot of stuff’s started to sink in. And sometimes I hear people talking about their jobs and families and stuff, and I picture myself, and it isn’t as weird....I guess I didn’t think I’d get to feel this at ease again, most of the time—especially not living with an old geezer. So I’m gonna say thank you, once, for basically saving my life. And I’m doing it this way so you can’t shrug it off.” He shuddered. “Okay. Get off of me.”

Blanca complied, and moved over to give Ash a little more space. He had been trying to process everything that had been said. Given the opacity of a typical conversation between the two of them, it was reassuring to hear Ash speak so frankly about their arrangement. It had weakened some of Blanca’s lingering uncertainties. It was so hard to tell, when it came to Ash, what wasn’t being said.

“Thank you, Ash,” he said. “I’m ho—”

His voice cracked in two. He opened his mouth and no sound came out. He blinked, and swallowed, and felt a horrible stone where his air should have been. He swallowed again.

“You’re going to have to excuse me,” he said, holding himself from wincing. He couldn’t look at Ash. He waited until he felt the seat cushion shifting to slide out. He stood beside the table, hesitating.

 _I’m honored,_ he had wanted to reply, but halfway through the words he had actually begun to feel what he was saying. So many empty passages and dialogues filled out with warmth and significance for him. Perhaps he had never felt proud before in his life.

“Excuse me,” he said again, barely, and slipped past Ash. He closed the kitchen door behind him, and turned on the faucet. Something was singing just outside the window, and as he bent over the sink and sobbed, he felt the glass dissolve away.

_Mweka Camp - 10,204 feet_

For days, now, Blanca had woken up from the same dream.

It always started with a train. He was moving between cars, looking for someone, and the further he went, the more precarious the doorways between them became. Every time, he had a letter he was trying to deliver. The contents of the letter changed, depending on the night. Sometimes, he had a love letter, or an order, or a will. Sometimes, he didn’t know what he was holding at all. He didn’t quite know what to make of it.

That morning, he had gone outside to get the paper, brewed a vat of coffee, and changed into shorts and a tourist t-shirt. When he came into the living room, Ash was sprawled on the couch with a cup of coffee by his head. He moaned at the sound of Blanca’s footsteps.

“Did I leave my coat there?” Blanca frowned, picking his trenchcoat up off the back of the couch. “Maybe I should drink less in the evenings. You’re up already?”

“Looks like it,” grumbled Ash, backing himself into an upright position. “Horrible night.”

“Sorry to hear it.” Blanca turned on his reading lamp and sat in his wicker chair. “First one in a while, though, right?”

Ash hummed. “Actually, yeah. I hadn’t noticed.” He sipped his coffee, black. “You were out with the girls?”

“Mm-hmm. Moira wouldn’t let us leave.” He had enjoyed a _marvelous_ night. “Actually, you came up. I didn’t realize you’d ended things with Nana. Things didn’t work out?”

“...it was actually going pretty well.”

“That’s what I’d thought,” said Blanca. 

He had a premonition of what Ash wasn’t saying in full. It was easier, in their corner of the world, to tell seasons apart by the number of tourists than by climate. In the States, brown leaves would be packing themselves into a wet carpet, and the temperature would be starting to verge on freezing. The two of them had weathered spring, summer, and now autumn in the standstill sunshine of the islands. It had been almost a year.

“I wonder what kind of jobs they have in Japan,” Blanca mused, and the shock in Ash’s face left him rather sure he was right.

“I don’t—I mean, probably the typical ones, right?” he stammered. “Doctors, lawyers, police, uh, private investigators—”

“Is that what you’re thinking? You want to be a PI?” Blanca’s eagerness bled into his voice. “You’d be well suited for it. Well connected, too. I’m sure I have friends of friends...but I didn’t expect you to be interested.”

“I—I dunno,” Ash said, blushing fiercely. “It’s contract work, and I’ve got money, so I wouldn’t have to waste time on stupid stuff. Plus I wouldn’t have to deal with asshole bosses.”

“That’s true. Those are good reasons.”

“But most of all,” he said, scowling, “I’m tired of scumbags trying to put me on top of everyone else. I don’t even want to rule over a sandbox. I just want to pull the rug out from under guys like them.”

“That’s probably a better reason,” Blanca laughed. Ash’s expression grew a little lighter, and he grinned.

Still, a quiet uncertainty was nagging Blanca, and loathe as he was to turn things serious, he felt he had to voice it.

“You’re sure you want to go back to that world? After everything it took to leave it?”

Ash’s smile didn’t entirely disappear, though the rest of his face seemed to fall. “Better me than someone else. I have the right build for it, I’d say…” His downcast eyes were pensive. “I don’t know if it’s really ‘going back,’ anyway. Not the same way. I’d be an outsider where it counts. Maybe that’s the best reason to do it.”

“If it works out that way,” said Blanca, “then I think you’d be right.”

In lieu of a response, Ash sipped his coffee again. He looked as content as Blanca had ever seen him. From what he’d heard, a few months ago, his student had begun popping up all over the island, catching the eye of tourists and locals alike with his honed charisma. _He was so clever,_ they told each other, _but he seemed so interested!_ With no other motives in sight, Blanca was inclined to assume his interest was genuine. His departures and returns had a certain restlessness to them, as though, for the first time on their retreat, he was eager to be doing something. Perhaps Ash was compensating for one person, whom he dearly missed—or perhaps, when he wasn’t forced to hobnob, or command, or be in the presence of despicables, he actually enjoyed other people.

“If I do go through with this,” Ash started suddenly, “can I ask another favor of you?”

“Yes,” Blanca replied, quite interested in the turn of conversation. “How can I help?”

“...I don’t know,” he faltered. “I might not understand as well as I—I mean, you can say no, so don’t get offended I asked.”

“Sure. What is it?”

“I was thinking that I’m going to need another name.”

“Another name.” Of course Ash would need one. A fake identity had gotten him to the Bahamas, and could easily get him out again—but he would need yet another pseudonym to keep his civilian life safe from his line of work. What Blanca didn’t understand was why Ash was framing this as a favor, and a large one at that. Did he want Blanca to come up with something? But covers didn’t need to be meaningful, and Ash wasn’t a hugely symbolic person.

“I want to take ‘Blanca’ off your hands,” said Ash.

Blanca didn’t understand. He’d told Ash everything. He knew where the name came from, and what it meant to him. There was no way he’d ask for something so personal on a whim. Ash would never be so selfish, and there had been nothing clever or teasing in the request. He looked dead serious. Perhaps there was some hidden significance for Ash in the name, or perhaps he was courting some idea of inheritance.

“That’s a hard ask, Ash,” he sighed.

“I know.” Ash held steady, though Blanca couldn’t miss the straight edge of his shoulders, drawn stiff with anxiety.

“Then why?”

“Because,” said Ash, with uncharacteristic delicacy, “I think you’re going to waste the rest of your life if I don’t. You can’t keep on like this. I don’t know what it’s been like for you, but for Skip, Shorter, Griffin...all you can do is face them and do right by them. You can’t do that as Blanca. So don’t you think it’s about time you started being Sergei again?”

When they took him to see the little headstone on a hill, the sun had slid to hover over the other side of the Urals, and cast everything in amber light. He’d reached up to tip his hat, and found that he could hardly move. It was the last time he would visit her, the last time he would stand in relation to her—leather boots, pristine grass—and _it should have been me_ became, by some trick of the light, _it was me._ There was no wholeness to him. He left his body in the ground and became a phantom, with only pleasure and guilt left to anchor him to the living world.

Ash was right. He had never felt so far away from Natasha as he did now. He had been passing through her for years, wearing her name like a talisman to keep her sacred and out of sight. How had he done it for so long, when it hurt so terribly to realize now?

He breathed in lightly. “And what about you? You really want to take on a name like that?”

“Suits me more every day,” Ash said, and laughed, genuine and a little sad. “There’s a lot of stuff I still have to reckon with. I’ve done so much shit that I can’t even think about right now. It’s taken me this long just to get my foot in the door with ‘normal,’ you know?”

“I do.”

“...but I think it’ll be easier this way. Act first, think second.” Still smiling, Ash’s eyes fell. “Maybe that’s what got me into this to begin with—fighting to survive without thinking about it, like a wild animal. I’m still terrified of being like that. But I guess the alternative scares me more.”

“Hmm. Then you’ve decided when you’re going to ‘act,’ I assume?”

“You see that stack of books?” He looked to where Ash was pointing and saw a mound of five or six textbooks with splashes of kanji across the covers. “When I get to the bottom of that, I’ll go.”

“That’ll be in no time,” he shook his head fondly, “knowing you.”

On the rarest nights, when Sergei remembered his wife in her full array of color—red, sky blue, platinum blonde—he pictured her in place of that stone on the hillside, standing in gold up to her knees, always speaking. In twenty years, he’d lost her voice. That was how it always ended up for him: people speaking when he couldn’t hear them, asking things of him that didn’t make sense, throwing bottles into the ocean with illegible letters inside, praying that the frailest vessels would bear them across the rolling distance to the loneliest islands in the Atlantic or anywhere else. 

When he watched people kiss on the street, when he basked in old novels, when he read his own love letters, he saw oceans, steppes, mountains stretch between every person he’d ever known, larger than life. Perhaps he was learning to love that there was such an art to understanding. It was absurd, yes, and frustrating, yes, but also wondrous—because the closer he came to those remotest of regions, the more inexplicable it seemed, to him, that there would ever be language at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Been working on this for a while now! I'm labeling this as a multi-chapter because I may add another chapter of epistolaries as an epilogue/continuation. You know, if I ever have time to do anything fun again ;) hope you enjoyed reading this, because I certainly enjoyed writing it!


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